John the Baptist: Getting Rid of the Detours to God

3 Advent b      December 17, 3 Advent
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 Psalm 126
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 John 1:6-8,19-28

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Why didn't the Gospel writers read each other?  Jesus is quoted in the Gospel of Matthew as saying, "If you will accept it, John the Baptist is the Elijah who was to come."  In John's Gospel, "John the Baptist is quoted as saying, I am not Elijah."  Who are you going to believe Jesus or John the Baptist and if you literally believe Jesus, then you might adopt the belief in reincarnation or transmogrification of the soul.  Of course, when one reads the Gospel, one chooses interpretive modes.  "The Elijah" does not need to refer to a return of Elijah but to a prophet functioning in a similar role as the original Elijah, a kind of "third person" Elijah-like figure.

One might note that the writer of John's Gospel perhaps did not read the writer of Matthew's Gospel.  They were writing at different times in different places for variety of different communities.  The oracle of Christ in the early Christianity community had a specificity in application to the needs of the community at the time when the writing was first written for a specific group or gathering of followers of Jesus.

How is the beginning of John's Gospel different?  It has no genealogy of Jesus.  It has no infancy narratives with shepherds, no angels, no marvelous and miraculous birth stories, no star moving in the skies guiding magi, no Simeon, no Anna, no Herod, no flight to Egypt, no slaughter of the innocent.  The Gospel of John does not even tell us that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.

As readers of the Gospels, we might want to ponder the differences in the Gospel presentations.  

John Gospel states that Christ was a pre-existent figure who was originally THE WORD WITH GOD and THE WORD BEING GOD.

Logically for humanity any awareness of ourselves existing happens because we live in the web of words and living in a web of word, we know ourselves to be word users.

COSMIC PRE-EXISTING WORD, became flesh in the person of Jesus revealing basically that even the experience in flesh and blood is mainly an experience of existing in words.

Jesus the Christ became the superlative configuration of a word event in humanity and the pre-story for how the pre-eminence of Jesus came about had to be told.

And in telling the story of Jesus, John the Baptist is a bridge figure between Hebrew Scripture traditions and the way in which Christians came to understand Jesus.

John's Gospel was the last canonical Gospel written and it was written by writers who knew that the community of John the Baptist had been a significant Movement in Palestine.  John's Gospel was written in a later time when there were still remnants of the community of John the Baptist around.

The writers of the Gospel of John were wondering:  Why haven't all of the followers of John the Baptist come over to follow Jesus yet?  Don't they know how John regarded himself?  Don't they know that he denied being the Messiah, he denied being Elijah and he even denied being a prophet.  Don't the followers of John the Baptist know that when John compared himself to Jesus, he said he was not worthy even to tie the thong of his sandals

Don't the follower of John the Baptist know that he introduced his most devout followers to Jesus and encouraged them to follow Jesus?

In the Gospel of John, the words of John the Baptist are completely self deprecating when he is comparing himself to Jesus.  He is not Elijah, he is not the Messiah, and he is not a prophet.  John reduced himself to a facet of language which is found in the Hebrew Scriptures:  John said he was but a Voice of one crying in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the Lord.

What was John the Baptist saying according to the writer of John's Gospel? 

He was saying, don't go to the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots, the Herodians, the Levites or the Samaritans and don't come to me.   Why?  All of these contain ways of the Lord but why take an indirect route when the straight and direct path to God's will was now to found in Jesus?

The Good News of the Gospel of John is that a direct path was open to God.  There was no longer any need to go on a long detour to God, around mountains, up mountains, down into valleys.  Go directly to Jesus.

John the Baptist said he was like a single pointing finger, pointing at Jesus.  "I'm not the main man, Jesus is. Go directly to him."

God as Word came most directly to humanity in Jesus Christ.  John the Baptist said, "You don't need any human detours of mediation from other human traditions.  The God as Word came most directly to us in Jesus Christ.  Now you go directly to God in Jesus Christ.

John the Baptist's evangelism is the same evangelism that we embrace today:  Like John, we say, "Go directly to Jesus.  Go directly to how the Word of God is made known to your life."

As Gospel evangelists, let us adopt the evangelism of John the Baptist as we say with him: "Go directly to Christ, the Messiah."   Amen.